Meet the couple behind Laid magazine, home of erotica for the Instagram age

Clare Gillies and Danny Lane make art that’s sexy, but not porny

“We’re really good stalkers, that’s what it comes down to,” says 26-year-old Clare Gillies, model and voiceover actor. The “we” includes her boyfriend, Danny Lane, a 31-year-old actor and photographer with whom she runs the online art-rotic (art + erotic, more on that later) site, Laid magazine. But it’s hard to imagine Gillies—who has a voice that Danny lovingly describes as “animated squirrel”—stalking anyone. She’s referring to the method by which they cast many of their shoots for Laid, i.e. falling down a good ol’ Instagram hole. “Most of our models are nurses, and baristas, and painters and stuff,” says Lane. “We’ve gotten pretty good at our pitch. We can tell when people are Laid. And most of the time people are like Hell yeah this looks awesome.”

Gillies and Lane launched Laid about a year ago when they still lived in New York City (they recently relocated to LA) and found themselves without an outlet for some of their work. “I was doing a lot of shoots and would hit a dead end,” says Lane. “I would be like where do I send these pictures, or Clare would collaborate with someone and be like what is all this for? So we created this outlet for ourselves and our friends, and it sort of snowballed.” They opened anInstagram account that took off, and then got shut down. They created another, garnered 10,000 followers—and got shut down. Social media popularity has its pitfalls: “I guess some people drank some haterade and reported our shit.” Lane and Gillies are upbeat nonetheless, re-establishing their account each time and rallying the nude troops to their cause purely for the love of the game. “We don’t necessarily want to monetize Laid. We do it because we love art,” says Gillies. “We’re basically a gallery,” agrees Lane, “we’re just promoting people. We don’t get paid, we lose money.”

From the beginning, they knew they wanted the site to have a sexed-up feel but not in the traditional erotic or porny sense. Rather, they wanted it to feel like a mix of actual art and low-key erotica and the result is an ever growing collection of images that feels like a downtown, hipster interpretation of Hustler—a long-haired, bearded man’s Sport’s Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The site has been tapping into a (dare we say) millennial desire for basically everything to be beautiful without appearing to have taken too much effort—lo-fi, but intentionally filtered content for the creative class. Models and photographers from all over the world who share this mindset have found Laid and sent in their own pictures and art to be published. “Sometimes we do get things that are more in the erotica zone than we feel is Laid,” Lane laughs. But as much as possible they try to work with people to get their submissions and stories to a good place. “We’re trying to share stuff and lift people up,” says Gillies. “Danny shoots nudes, and I’ve posed nude, and we were in this circle of people in New York who were all kind of doing the same thing,” says Gillies. “We wanted to make it more acceptable, more approachable. We wanted to get it to a really beautiful middle ground.”